I gather SLI owners with multi-display or 4K setups are the most likely to benefit from the additional memory currently. I also personally prefer FXAA which uses much less vram, but I know many still insist on MSAA which can be pretty resource intensive at hi-res, especially with the aforementioned texture packs or other game mods. Memory is still a big consideration though for a lot of people (myself included) who are big into mods and other user/community made content where good optimization just isn't gonna happen. For single card, single display gaming I'll agree most people will be perfectly fine with 2GB.

No idea what the consoles plan to do with all their memory, but I have total faith in Microsoft to find something to fill theirs up with. The 30GB of undeletable tat in my WinSXS folder before each annual re-install inspires plenty of a confidence in that assumption.

Take a look at the DX11 and DX11.1 white papers. There's a very clean indication that memory requirements are decreasing.

As for texture packs, that's a thing of the DX9 and DX10 days. With tessellation and other methods, the very nature of adding the illusion of textures into a game is changing.

I have a feeling that this is because most devs shoot for console level graphics. With the new games coming in the horizon you're going to see those decreasing mem reqs being forced higher due to higher texture resolutions and effects. Source files alone for an average AAA title can be anywhere from 100gb to 500+gb before compression. And we compress the hell out of everything before we start cheating ;). As soon as we get more headroom anywhere we will fill that up instantly. There isn't a video card that will be released in the next 5 years that could run raw art from games already a few years old. Thats one of the reasons why it takes a stupid amount of resources to run crysis 3 ;)

Im not sure what the 'other methods' you're talking about are, because in the industry it's exactly textures. We use all sorts of different maps to achieve our desired effects. If you think about our high poly bakes they're in the double digit of millions of triangles with even more vert counts. We still have to bake out all of the details to normal maps and reduce the model to a few thousand for it to run on current video cards. Offhand the only thing that I can think of that doesn't use a map of some kind is vert blending... and thats for blending two maps. Oh and lighting, programming, and most animation just to beat you wise guys to it :P

I can tell you that with whats in development now 4gb will more than likely be the norm for next gen. Look to the consoles. Studios will develop for the pc as an afterthought.. and this makes me sad :(

I think it's important not to forget that while the the PS4 or XBOX ONE may have 5GB of unified memory, the GPUs won't be anywhere near a GTX 770. Aren't they closer to AMD 7790-7850 (optimistic)? They are not powerful enough to drive graphics utilizing 2GB or VRAM let alone 4GB.

I could be wrong, but I'm sure a 7850 or any card for that matter would not be encumbered by large amounts of data flowing through ram. A 7850 is only going to be as fast as a 7850 is, regardless of ram amount. That is until a game requires more ram to keep the textures ready to load. I think there is a point where the CPU would be the bottleneck not being able to fill the buffer fast enough. But that would be a very extreme non-realistic fantasy. I don't think such a scenario exists.

Where more ram would be more useful, even on low end cards, would be extra large textures. I don't think speed is at issue here but IQ.

With regards to consoles, they will never be half as good at gaming (IQ and controls) as a PC. At least not for certain genres. If we want to push the boundries of gaming the PC has always been where it is at. Regrettably, it doesn't pay as well as consoles for devs so we get stuck in the past. I hope I am wrong but I still don't see that changing.